Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to drive more traffic is add web content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the blueprint. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to ensure that web traffic will automatically start flowing when you post new content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition making business survival increasingly more difficult businesses are researching every advantage they can that can help you improve their results and performance online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Phase Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to describe the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take additional work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All is running smoothly in the gizmo workshop when suddenly, things just stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and immediately walks towards the control box. After staring at the board for 3 minutes, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy hammer from his utility belt and makes a gentle tap near the left-hand edge of the unit.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The floor manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Furious, the manager picks up the phone and rings the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged so much for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to be compensated fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP site set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
While many experts often make difficult solutions look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring settings for a client. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to get desired results
- Which options need to be configured in order to make sure processes will run as envisioned, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your server, your web site, and various third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the configuration phase)
Let’s take a better look at these areas.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your web hosting account that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites.
External Sites & Accounts – Configuration
The concept behind adding external sites is that all content will get posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external platforms to your traffic network, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social media accounts, even to users of the platform itself. Your content receives increased exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site to save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up before configuring your settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account, you can use your details to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, you can add your account code to all of your web pages in WordPress using a plugin and send data instantly to many other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account has been set up, the information can be used to automate web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up before you can configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your page.
There are many different sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically ping various update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to sites linked to from your posts, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Section)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, see this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, website security is something you cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to choose which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also give you built-in options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your site is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other WordPress Sections For More Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online (or plan to), it’s important that your website is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
WordPress Categories And Tags
Tags and post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When configuring your site to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A visitor site map that displays all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Only search engine bots can understand XML sitemaps. Although Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your WordPress 404 Error Page
When visitors type in the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is publish great content regularly to automatically bring more traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process can take many website professionals months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To continue reading about this topic, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive tutorial series designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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